Their Eyes Were Watching God

Characters

Janie
Story revolves around her relationship with other people, however it is predominantly a story about the self. Janie is looking for spiritual enlightenment and a strong sense of her own identity. It is not about a quest for a partner but about a quest for a sense of independence. Significantly she starts and ends the novel alone.

Start of Story- unsure of who she is or how she wants to lives End of Story- strong and proud

For Janie, her story journey starts with a revelation under a pear tree. Under the pear tree she witnesses a perfect union of harmony with nature. She realizes she wants to experience this type of love, a reciprocity that produces a oneness.

For Jodie, Joe Starks seems to present an ideal alternative to the dull and pragmatic Logan Killicks. The repression of her life with Joe is best represented through the cathartic speech she gives him on his death bed. Contrastingly, she flourishes with Tea Cake. Some critics say her dependency on Tea Cake works to undermine her feminist search for identity. Ironically her true independence comes when she kills Tea Cake.

Vergible Woods,Tea Cake, while being a main character does not have the depth of other characters in the story. His primary role is that of a catalyst that allows Janie to reach her goals.
Two ways he helps her is by encouraging her to accept herself, and live comfortably for the first time within a black community.

Tea Cake

Joe Starks
Joe Starks is the opposite of Tea Cake in that he is cruel, concieted, and not interested in Janie a person. He meanness is not predicated on not loving Janie, but on his world view. He understands happiness and security comes from power. This obsession with power is what motivates most of his actions. Figuritively, Janie can be said to kill Joe as well, as she ridicules him in front of the town folk, and thus disempowers him.

Janie's grandmother, who raises her in the absence of her mother. A former slave who was raped by her master, Nanny teaches Janie that the "nigger woman is de mule uh de world." In her hopes that Janie will have a better life. Later in life, after Jody has died, Janie reassesses the advice Nanny had given her. "Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon ... and pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter's neck tight enough to choke her." Janie decides that she hates Nanny for teaching her to bury her own desires for the sake of security.

Nanny